Tag Archive: power

Transcript: In this lecture I want to discuss one of the most important philosophers who is still working, still alive, his work ranges over many areas in social theory, it ranges in areas of philosophy, linguistics and so on, and that’s Jurgen Habermas. Habermas is one of the last great defenders of rationalism in a period in philosophy in which rationalism is not held in very high esteem. In many ways Habermas is an outgrowth of one of the figures that we discussed last time, namely Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School; that would include Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Habermas was in fact Adorno’s graduate assistant and so the original project that Jurgen Habermas set himself was to reformulate the kinds of theories being worked on by Marcuse, by Horkheimer and by Adorno. In particular his first venture was to reformulate their distinction between traditional theory – understood as both philosophy and science, both – as opposed to what they called “critical theory”; a theory whose interest was in the emancipation of human beings. View Full Article »

Transcript: In this lecture I’d like to discuss Nietzsche as artist, and also – I don’t know if it’s on what we might call the course syllabus, but – Nietzsche and his political uses, and the two are deeply interconnected. I have said that I don’t want to treat Nietzsche as a mere literary figure, and when I say “Nietzsche as Artist”, I have in mind this strong project of self creation, which is to make one’s own life a work of art. A very difficult thing is to sculpt oneself; it’s much easier to sculpt in stone than to sculpt in that invisible mysterious material of the self. View Full Article »

Transcript: I’d like to wrap up my remarks about self creation, self invention, and the challenge of The Eternal Recurrence by saying that we need to remember that this has to do… that this has to do with what I mentioned later in the lecture: the love of fate. Loving the place you have found yourself in history. And sometimes that’s a difficult thing to do, and for me that’s a quite personal remark that has to do with my own self invention. To try to love the place I have found myself in history, like many other people now is… I find that difficult. Nietzsche on the other hand thought it might be difficult, but it was a challenge that we should attempt to meet. View Full Article »

Transcript: Okay, ah, last time I may have dropped out of my West Texas mode for a moment and become a little too philosophical, so I am going to try to restate a few things from Nietzsche in a simple way, quickly, before I move on to some remarks about Kierkegaard. Ah, what I was trying to evoke in you was more the spirit of Nietzsche than the specific text. The spirit of Nietzsche is one of deep suspicion, and that suspicion is that power is intertwined with things that we normally like to think of, even today, as not being dependent on power, for example; truth, goodness, and so on. Nietzsche says they are. View Full Article »

Transcript: Last time, in our last lecture we were screaming about the United States government and its many failings. I want to make clear something, and its… unfortunately in the current context… ah, I must tell you that many of you who came here to hear a course on “Philosophy and Human Values” probably expected more “Philosophy” and less on the “Human Values” side. Well, I hope some of you were here yesterday when I ran through a series of ethical theories; and I think I gave some arguments. That was my “professionalising” work. In other words, that was the display of my rough credentials to do this. View Full Article »

Transcript: First, what’s supposed to be so scandalous about Nietzsche. Nietzsche is supposed to hold the scandalous view that knowledge is a form of power. Now that is scandalous because knowledge is knowledge. It’s objective. You know, like journalism. And it would be scandalous to show that wherever we find knowledge, we will find it structured and constructed around a system (or systems) of power. Won’t find one without the other. View Full Article »

Meta

recent comments...

Gage Slusser, Jr.: I'm directing as many people as possible to this site on Facebook.
I dubbed my tapes from the Teaching Company (The Self Under Siege) onto my IPod.
I hope the irony of these two efforts to constrain Professor Roderick to immortality would cause him to guffaw.
Would that we could share in his conversation with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Foucault....

Gage: Perhaps the most refreshing teacher The Teaching Company has had in its stable. Greenberg, Vandiver and Levine - there are really too many to list. Roderick is up there - in at least two senses of the term. He's probably debating the nature of the afterlife with Rufus Fears....

Jorge: One of Rodericks quotes I love the most,
"The death of God is about a drying up of a horizon of meaning..."
It´s up to us to create what gives meaning to life....

Twin Peaks: thanks a million to the creators of this site, i hope it never shuts down. excellent lecture. I really this post and lectures particularly because it discusses modern times...